Whilst in New York for the Yext App Directory release I was fortunate to find time to meet with Stephen Stanczak Founder, MarTech Wiz and we spent 40 minutes discussing evvnt, the event marketing economy and the Yext app directory integration. Listen to the full podcast here.

https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/martechwiz-public/evvnt-podcast.mp3
Event Marketing is a Secret Sauce, take some time to hear what Richard Green the CEO & Founder of evvnt has to say about it. With all the various tools and siloed expertise in the market, evvnt is looking to consolidate the market and bridge the skill gap with event marketing automation.

Headlines / Minutes

2:35 About evvnt – Single Submission Event Marketing for people running public facing events including venues and local business.

3:41 How it started – it started in London but we were found by customers in over 139 countries who started submitting events and also supplying local market insights into new event listing sites we were not aware of.

5:10 The Vision – Delivering a campaign of services such as listings, ticketing email, social media, sms that a seasoned event marketer puts together to ensure a successful event marketing campaign down to registrations and sales.

6:02 Service Commitment – 100 service commitment to ensure we supply events data to 100% of the events listing sites that want the information, publishers want local content, our job is to build the infrastructure to get the data to partners. With leading partners like Eventful, Eventbrite, Yext etc who have API’s we can simply work with their data structure to manage data in and out, for the rest we have an open evvnt API which allows our publishing partners to work with our data structure to not only supply events which go on our service but also take our clients events which they can serve onsite.

8.30 Local V’s Enterprise – We don’t cold call, we target an event organiser the moment they put an event on the web, by filling out an event form the intent is there, acceleration of this process is an obvious upgrade for a marketer. The big difference is that in the local space event organisers are not looking for solutions as they have been doing this manually for years, in the enterprise space they are looking for solutions.

12:35 What does Yext do – It’s a business that provides a syndicated service for business information but they have not figured out how to manage the syndication of events data to listing sites which for Yext, this is a great opportunity. Yext is going through a process.

14:50 – How does the integration with Yext work: Simple, you go into the Yext account, choose the evvnt app on the Yext App Directory and give us authorisation to access your events. We then port that data over to our app where we can give Yext users access to our network of 4500 event listing sites. Challenges include opening up the data collection points, the second will be the communication to their current customers to educate this opportunity to exist and lastly training of their sales organisation.

19:35 Advice for Event Marketers – In the main, most people talk about successful event marketing but the job is hard. The best advice given is to create 4 to 8 to 12 weeks between today and the day of the event, create a ticketed page so you can track conversions, next decide on the tools to market the event which include to your current customer and also to a new business audience. 30% – 60% repeat customers for those strong long-term events so even these need 40% to 70% new audience.

22:55 The Penny Drop Moment on how evvnt works – The moment you syndicate an event on to 40+ event listing sites relevancy is based on a google search finding what is a phenomenal amount of relevant and target. 86% of people who end up on an event listing site start with a Google search, so by creating exceptional content that can be found in search you see how this can build value for event marketers and also people looking for events.

27:20 We launched evvnt April 1st 2012 – The MVP in the early days was served in a Google doc to see how the client responded to our method and monitored what happened when we applied these methods. We have continued to build technology based on our client’s product requests over 5 years. We are very proud to be still operating and the main value in the company comes from the people we employ, success is built from people who execute.

33:25 Technology and leaderships – building technology is expensive, however, if you leverage it then it pays. We have always struggled to source the best development but this is expensive and we are now with an outsourcing company based in Poland – read more

35:35 What hurdles have you overcome – Funding is essential, number two is a product or service you can sell which gives you a commercial opportunity and lastly the staff who work very hard to ensure customers are happy. You get staff across the board which drives a good product and keep a good funding line. My primary is to ensure the business will last the distance, longevity is critical.

This podcast on Yext, evvnt, Eventbrite, Netguru and event marketing tech was made possible by MartechWiz